The server market can only go up from the pitiful levels it set in the second quarter, according to the box counters at IDC, which pegged the period from April through June as the worst in the history of the systems business.

AMD looks set to beat arch-rival Nvidia to the release of DirectX 11-capable graphics cards. It will ship suitable GPUs in October, around the time Windows 7 will introduce the new 3D graphics framework.

Analysis
Yesterday the UK's arms industry launched its renewed pitch for more government money. Shooting themselves in the foot somewhat, assembled weapons-biz kingpins revealed that - by their own estimation - the UK taxpayer is already supporting at least twice as many well-paid British arms workers as there are (poorly-paid) soldiers in the British army.

Nokia announced two dedicated music phones in Stuttgart this morning, which are only available with its "free" Comes With Music service. The service bundles a year's worth of unlimited music downloads.

NASA's Terra satellite has captured a dramatic image of the Los Angeles "Station Fire" wildfire. It is one of at least seven conflagrations currently affecting California, which by yesterday had reportedly laid waste to over 133,000 acres and consumed 80 buildings.

The Blu-ray Disc Association has yet again said it's looking at how it can incorporate 3D TV content into the optical disc standard - but with still no indication in which technological direction its investigation is leaning.

Every storage player wants to be a good citizen in the VMware virtual data centre and server world. They showed up to VMworld to be seen and counted, and to demonstrate that they too can play nice in what is increasingly looking to be an EMC-owned data centre and server interface to all things networking and storage.

"Ministers have been forced to order an emergency shutdown of a key Government computer system to protect millions of people's private details. The action was taken after a memory stick was found in a pub car park containing confidential passcodes to the online Government Gateway system, which covers everything from tax returns to parking tickets."

Top British climate boffins have said that the only practical hope for arresting global warming is the use of "geoengineering" - techniques intended to reduce the effects of CO2 emissions, as opposed to reducing the CO2 emissions themselves.

Review
The mobile version of Intel’s Core i7 processor isn’t due to arrive until early next year, so we were a little surprised to hear that UK system builder Rock was about to launch a new range of laptops based around the i7.

Since VMware and virtual stuff are all the rage, here are three virtual solid state disk stories. Well, rumours. Take them at less than face value if you will, but they do come from reputable and credible sources.

Poll Results
‘Desktop virtualization’ has been an oft-heard phrase over recent years, but talk does not automatically translate into action. So what is the state of play regarding deployments of the many desktop virtualization alternatives that exist?

First Look
Announced last week, the N900 finally gives Nokia something competitive in the high-end market, and offers a great deal for developers to get excited about. I had a hands on today and came away with fairly positive impressions, for an iPhone user. But more importantly, Nokia has a roadmap that takes it into the next decade.

American death-tech goliath Boeing has announced a long-delayed in-flight firing for the smaller of its two aeroplane raygun-cannon prototypes, the Advanced Tactical Laser (ATL). The ATL blaster, mounted in a Hercules transport aircraft, apparently "defeated" an unoccupied stationary vehicle.

Regcast
As part of our Virtualization Workshop series, we've got a studio full of proper virtualization experts to tackle your questions on anything and everything to do with Server Virtualization. You can join them right here for free.

Oracle, which will presumably soon own Sun Microsystems, has not said much about its plans for the Sparc server business at Sun since announcing its takeover in April - but apparently the top brass at the company are going to assuage everyone's fears that Oracle will ditch Sun iron, and will do so on October 14 at the OpenWorld extravaganza hosted by Oracle.

Commercial Linux distributor Red Hat is hosting its annual summit in Chicago this week, and the star of the event was today's launch of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4, which sports the first commercially supported KVM hypervisor from the company.

Microsoft has confirmed a vulnerability in its Internet Information Services webserver and spelled out the conditions under which it can be exploited to give an attacker complete control of the server on which it runs.